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How Dungeons & Dragons creator Gygax created the modern nerd

By Darren ZenkoSpecial to the Star

Sun., March 9, 2008

Eulogizing E. Gary Gygax, "the Father of Dungeons & Dragons," is a lot different than coming up with postmortem praise for, say, a great playwright or a titan of literature – Gygax's accomplishment makes him more like the person who first conceived staged drama, or the guy who came up with the idea for books. Before D&D there was nothing like D&D; its advent created nerddom as we know it, and changed culture forever.

The antecedents of D&D were heroic fantasy literature on the one hand and tabletop war-gaming on the other. Both were proto-nerdy pursuits, and had been around for centuries by the time Gygax and collaborator Dave Arneson published their first set of role-playing rules in 1974. The singular genius of D&D was in bringing the two together, creating a statistical framework for simulating the fantastic worlds of Tolkien, Malory, and Robert E. Howard.

Overnight, fantasies of knights, wizards and rogues went from products you consumed (or maybe even created) in the privacy of your own head, to something you played – unique experiences generated with other people according to ground rules everybody (usually) agreed on: role-playing games were born.

Dungeons & Dragons was perfectly timed, and perfectly of its time. The leading edge of Generation X had turned teen, and D&D offered an escape – and a social life – to the bookworms, brainiacs, daydreamers and malaise-ridden misfits who opted out of punk. As the '80s drew near, the game Gygax had thought might sell 50,000 copies to a niche market had become an underground craze. The world's disparate geeks had unified into a subculture with its own language, iconography, rituals and fetish objects – and the modern Nerd was born.

I came to D&D at about 10 years old, discovering a 1977-edition Basic Set in the closet of my parents' guest bedroom. I still don't know how it got there, but I was instantly hooked. That boxful of booklets, hundreds of pages of the closest-set type I'd ever read outside of cereal-box ingredients, broken up with thrilling (and, honestly, titillating) line art of monstrosity and derring-do, was my first introduction to fantasy literature.

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The mass media discovered Dungeons & Dragons right about that same time, in the same way it discovers everything – in as scary a way as possible. Straight-A students driven mad by "satanic" game! Black masses, evil rituals! Brainwashed college freaks play at wizards and warriors in subterranean steam tunnels! A young Tom Hanks made his starring debut in Mazes and Monsters, the Reefer Madness of role-playing games. I lost my first gaming buddies, two brothers, to the panic of their Christian parents, who burned their Monster Manuals and Dungeon Master's Guides and doused the ashes with holy water.

As is usual with think-about-the-children panics, the scare had the opposite effect on me; I couldn't wait to get to college, where all this real hardcore D&D was going down. I bided my time playing computer RPGs – spawn of Gygax, all – and daydreamed dangerous steam-tunnel journeys. More than a doorway into myth, magic and fantasy, Gygax's rules, sourcebooks and published adventures offered me, and millions of others like me, a doorway into community.

When I finally joined the gamers club, the industry Gygax spawned was at its peak, and the club's shelves sagged under the weight of hundreds of games in dozens of genres. There were no clandestine underground orgies, just a tiny club office packed with the kind of community fantasy role-playing had drawn to itself in every town: number-crunchy engineers and computer programmers, grad students, shell-shocked veterans of high-school ostracism, airy-fairy junior pagans, Goths, fantasy addicts, army reservists, artists, improv actors, borderline autistics and plain old dorks. We weren't always playing D&D – honestly, those of us in the avant-garde of "collaborative storytelling" were sort of embarrassed by it – but this improbable society of misfits would have been unimaginable before Gygax's game.

No piece of mass-cultural shorthand evokes nerddom like the phrase "Dungeons & Dragons player," because D&D in effect created the modern nerd by offering misfits of countless, often antithetical, persuasions a big tent – a big, dorky tent – under which to gather and build their identity. It comes as no surprise that creators as disparate as Moby and Mike Myers were players. Nerds are the architects of our world – scientists, programmers, engineers, doctors, writers, artists – and many or most of them grew up, and continue to grow up, sharing real and fantasy lives alike in a subculture that couldn't have existed until Gary Gygax made it possible.

We comprise the biggest, brightest adventuring party ever assembled, and this week we raise our flagons in memory of the man who first whispered to us of the treasures underground.

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